Slashdot Mirror
What Mac OS X Could Learn From Windows
An anonymous reader writes "It is almost unheard of to see something written about what OS X could learn from Windows but this details some good examples. And yes, it includes the right-click mouse." I find about half the suggestions compelling enough to be worth griping over, and the other half off-base, but YMMV.
Apple - and the zealotry - need to concede that this battle is lost.
Huh? So Apple are meant to disrupt the muscle memory of practically every Apple user, by dropping a scheme that they have stuck to for decades, to make it slightly easier for a minority of people who use two different systems on a regular basis?
What complete and utter nonsense. What next? Drop the dock in favour of a taskbar that works like Windows... because "this battle is lost"? After all, if it doesn't work like Windows, then it must be a disaster!
Apple has had support for a two button mouse for the better part of twenty years. Just plug one it, and go...simple as that. The fact that most users chose not to spend the extra $30 to do so, tells you that they didn't really miss it.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
This one is a real bother for me on my with Macs. Anybody have a hack or 3rd party way of doing this.
FYI to non Mac'ers, Mac OSX only allows you to re-size windows at the top left corner of the window .
From TFA (emphasis mine):
1) Compatible control keys. Switching between Mac and Windows this drives me nuts. I have to consciously think "command-C or control-C?" It shouldn't have to be that way. And if you're running RDC or VPC and copying and pasting between OS X and Windows!! Sheesh!
The problem isn't the labeling, it's the location of the keys used. I had to use a Windows PC today and I kept pressing Alt-C to copy. This is why it's a problem. If it was simply a matter of labeling, no worries, mate. Apple - and the zealotry - need to concede that this battle is lost.
Implementing this would rock many people's boats, so if Apple did make this change it'd have some serious domino affect on other keystrokes and applications that use them, but maybe it could be done with the switch to Intel, just to ease the pain slightly.
Umm, how exactly did Apple lose? Was there a national convention that decided that the main command issuing modifier key should be hit by the pinky? I much prefer to move my thumb from the space bar and hit command than move my pinky from the a to hit control. Why exactly do we need to conceed here? Because you think you you're right Mr. Author?
Track your TV Shows with your iPhone - FREE
OSX can learn by the bad example that Windows sets in terms of security, usability, stability, and well, just about everything else. Wait... In fact it seems like OSX has already learned those lessons!
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I think the idea is that your cursor doesn't change into a dozen different zany pictures and adopt a dozen different functions depending on which part of the window you're pointing at.
It's all about simplicity.
there's more than one way to do me.
I think this writer still hasn't got it. OSX has supported multi button mice for ages - I have a 5 button Microsoft bluetooth mouse working perfectly with 10.3, making expose easy to use.
The whole point of the one button mouse is to make it easy to use for beginners, and to prevent developers being lazy when designing programs. And using expose with a single mouse button only needs for the screen corners to be set up to trigger the actions.
While some of the points seem relevant, others are completely off the mark.
Save button on toolbars: This is hardly an OS X issue. Lots of Mac apps have them. I can't remember if iApps do or don't, but there's no big deal there.
Only showing relevant file types: The current method is classic Steve. You show all files because the user knows they exist and you don't want to confuse him. Advantages both ways.
Sort directories to the top: If that's a problem, you probably have your tree setup poorly. Again, one can argue this both ways.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Mac already supports right-click, and more. in fact, my iBook scroll pad has the functionality of a mouse with 5 buttons and 2 scroll wheels. but I usually use my Apple single-click buletooth mouse. it's enough.
REQUIRE just one button, SUPPORT multiple is the Mac way. and it's also the best way. anyone who doesn't understand this is ignorant.
1. Control keys can be changed in the preferences for the OS, and for RDC and VPC as well. Plus, it wouldn't be horrendously difficult to change the key mapping to make it more convenient as well.
2. Save buttons on toolbars are up to the developers. And in all honesty, I think a lot more people use keyboard commands to save, instead of clicking on a tiny little button in a toolbar that not even every app has. This definitely is not an OS specific thing...they're available if you need it, but nobody's forcing anyone to use it..
3. My Logitech MX518 works on my Macs. So does my MX900 bluetooth mouse. And all of the other multi-button mice I've ever bothered to connect via USB or bluetooth. end of argument, unless you're trying to say that Apple should ship multi-button mice with their computers. They shouldn't. There's almost nothing worth having a multi-button mouse for that you can't do with a one button mouse, or with the keyboard (except when it comes to gaming and the likes). Now, with the coming Intel Macs, maybe they should. But that's only assuming the person buying the machine will install another OS on it as well.
4. Why on earth do you need to see only the relevant file types? Sometimes OS X will grey out the ones that aren't relevant or not selectable, but what good is it going to do? Afraid of accidentally naming your file a name that already exists?!
5. Useless. In all honesty, Spotlight/Quicksilver/Launchbar sort of get rid of the need for that, like the article mentioned.
6. Why on earth is this supposed to be a Windows thing? It's not. It's in OS X. Blame the developer(s) if it's lacking in the software you're using and complaining about.
Frankly it sounds like the author is just an idiot, but that's my two cents. All of his points are almost completely irrelevant or not applicable.
On top of that, might I add that Microsoft and Apple have copied each other too many times to count, and it's not necessarily good.
Go into your keychain and turn on the menubar addon. Then you can lock your screen with two clicks of your one-button mouse.
Simple.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
The two UIs are designed to be used differently. The Mac interface is designed to have a lot of windows visible at the same time. Windows is designed to have one fullscreen window (or two tiled windows)visible at a time. A sibling comment says it perfectly: "Though at least windoes makes it easier to use one window per screen."
I understand your frustration -- I'm accustomed to the Mac method and I find Windows (especially the giant opaque super-windows in Windows Office) infuriating.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
From article: Switching between Mac and Windows this drives me nuts. I have to consciously think "command-C or control-C?" It shouldn't have to be that way. And if you're running RDC or VPC and copying and pasting between OS X and Windows!! Sheesh!
If you really must do this, you can do it in 'system preferences'. Just go to the 'Keyboard & Mouse' pref pane and click the modifier keys button. voila! switch control and option or whatever else you want.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Another result of the same decision to use th eALT key for keyboard shortcuts is that it prevented form being used as a kind of super-shift key for typing characters. On the Mac this is great - it's trivially easy to type accented charactérs as you gö along if you want, without breaking your typing speed or train of thought - by using ALT (or option, in Mac parlance) to get to those characters. On Windows, you have to open up a whole separate character palette and cut and paste it from there, or else memorise very arcane keyboard codes. While OS X also has a character palette, it's not often that you have to use it, while on Window you have little choice. To compound the problem on Windows, it also cuts and pastes the font and style from the character palette, which is just plain stupid - I just want the character, please adopt the font and style where I paste it! This is so obvious that I wonder just who provides UI decisions on Windows - this one could have been done better if a 5-year old child had been consulted.
What MS should have done is to specify that an extended keyboard with a command key would be necessary to access keyboard shortcuts in Windows, and within 6 months or a year, those keyboards would have been the standard. Instead they imposed a workaround that had no upsides except compatibility with the existing PC keyboard, and many downsides that are simply accepted by the 'dozers today as "the way it is".
Like everyone else, I'm going to look at the suggestions:
1) Compatible control keys.
Oh, please, no.
If it matters, then there should be an argument about which way is better, other than "more people are used to the Microsoft way". And if it doesn't matter, then it shouldn't be a big deal.
It isn't the labelling, but the position? Let's not muck around too much with the position, eh? It was an unmitigated disaster when some bozo decided that the control key ought to be on the same row as the space instead of to the left of the "A" key; let's not continue the trend of rendering the standard keyboard unusable.
If you want a different layout, remap the keys yourself, or buy a different keyboard. Line up to buy one of the Optimus keyboards if they come out next year, and map all of the keys to exactly where you want them.
If I were paranoid, I'd say that this suggestion was designed to drive the sorts of people who haven't been appropriately indoctrinated into the Microsoft Windows Way[tm] away from computers entirely. If I had to use the Dell keyboard that came with the machine at work, I'd probably be contemplating a job that didn't involve computers, and wouldn't for the foreseeable future.
2) Save button on toolbars.
As has been pointed out, this is an application thing, not an OS thing.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of toolbars. Trying to puzzle out the little icons isn't a profitable use of my time (and! yet! here! I! am! on! slashdot! yeah, yeah, I get the irony.), so I'd just as soon have the option to get rid of the toolbars and reclaim that screen real-estate for getting actual work done.
Finally, the appropriate solution would be to give the user the choice of setting up the toolbar (like Mail.app) with every possible leaf in the menu-tree. Why bicker about "save", when all the leaves in the menu should be allowable targets for the user to put into the toolbar?
3) A multi button mouse
Hardware request. Bogus objection.
What I want is a freaking three-button mouse with a scroll-wheel, where the scroll-wheel isn't trying to double-up as the third button. Yes, I know, I can "just click on the scroll-wheel", but I don't want to. I also don't want tiny little buttons that I can use with my thumb or pinky or whatever. I'm not looking for a funky keyboard on my mouse, after all (which is where this eternally-growing-button-list trend goes).
But if the OS works with a single-button mouse, fine. Why should that be a problem? You want people who do best with a single-button mouse to have a terrible time with their computer? Such sadism makes for a very poor UI, and is no doubt part of the reason I bailed out of the Microsoft-centric world-view many years ago.
4) Only show relevant file types in open and save dialogs.
Many applications ghost out "inappropriate" files already. But making the actual hiding of information a system default is just bad form -- I get extremely annoyed when my computer hides information from me.
Which leads into this nonsense of "hiding file extensions". THEY ARE NOT FREAKING EXTENSIONS: THE ARE SUFFIXES!
Yes, boys and girls, it's the height of idiocy to look at the NAME of a file to determine how to handle it when you can look in a file to see what sort of thing it actually is. One of the stupidest "features" of Microsoft Windows is it's inability to understand that a JPEG file is actually a JPEG file even thought it's named "Foo", or, gosh darn it, even maliciously renamed to "Foo.GIF".
5) Sort folders to top of directory listings
Th
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
Every time I hear about articles like this, even if they have some sort of merit, I feel that the author missed something:
If I travel to another country, people there have their way of doing things. They have their own culture. Sure things may seem difficult to the foreigner, but to the people living there everything makes sense and for them it is obvious. The only way to deal with it is to learn about that culture and accept things for what they are. Of course that doesn't mean that they are immune to learning different ways of doing things.
Switching to a different OS is much the same thing. Not everything is going to make sense, but some things might. Over time you learn the way things work there and accept things for what they are, better or worse.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
What i hate about the Finder is when you open a view of a Folder using "View As List", and then have to manually tweak the window size in order to fit the list details in that view.
.. and it will resize the list view columns as well, so that the data just fits nicely.
.. why isn't Finder smart enough to adjust the Detail columns according to the metrics of the data being displayed? Seems to me I could fix it with Applescript, but damn .. I wish Finder just moved itself around to conform to your window setting..
With Windows Explorer, you can hit Control-Numpad+ and it will automatically do a little jig for you to get all the content revealed in your window
I desperately need this feature in Finder
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The real clincher though is when you come to use a touch-screen. If you've used Windows on a touchscreen then you will know that you spend an enormous amount of time hitting the button that makes your next click a right click (and some things you can't do at all, because they require right-drag). If you have used a Mac on a touch-screen, you will know that you don't. The reason for this is that Mac software is all designed on the understanding that a user may not have a second button. If Apple release a TabletMac, then they will have a wealth of software that is already highly usable with it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1. Compatible control keys
The gist of this writer's complaint is squarely focussed on the positioning of the 'Command' key (some call it the 'Apple' key) on the Mac keyboard. He goes as far as to say that 'Apple - and the zealotry - need to concede that this battle is lost..
I am both a Windows and OS X user (Windows mainly for games) and I can attest that the Mac keyboard command key layout is vastly superior to that of a standard PC keyboard because of the position that you must contort your hand into in order to use the latter.
For many PC users it is a case of simply not having experienced any better, so it's difficult to convince them to change their ways, but take an objective view of using both layouts with just one hand, and it's incredibly difficult to argue that the PC way is less strenuous. Perhaps this is responsible for much greater adoption of keyboard shortcuts among casual users on the Mac platform.
2. Save button on toolbars
Saving actively modifies a file on disk, perhaps overwriting or saving a 'bad' copy over what was originally a preferred version by accident. I am content not to have my toolbar filled with such items. However, this suggestion is not entirely devoid of merit (unlike the others, as we'll see).
3. A multi-button mouse
I don't understand why we still have this issue. You can plug practically any mouse into OS X, with any obscene number of buttons you desire and it will work. The writer continues: 'Why stop at two? Especially with things like Exposé, Dashboard and Spotlight.'. It would, frankly, be a nightmare for anyone but a poweruser to use. My mother does just fine with a one button mouse, she has enough trouble remembering what needs to be single clicked and what needs to be double clicked in the interface. This is truely a ridiculous idea. The preliferation of dozens of buttons of mice is a typical Windows thing - just look at how the Start menu itself has also grown from a simple and fairly useful applications menu (Win 95) to the default monstrosity of usability that it is today (Win XP).
It's also worth mentioning that the usability of software on the Mac platform benefits hugely by forcing developers to come up with more elegant ways with which to allow control of the app - rather than (as is all too often the case in Windows) relying on the context menu to shuffle all the little commands into.
4) Only show relevant file types in open and save dialogs.
This has the effect of confusing users by making it look as though some of their stuff may be missing. It also does not allow for the identification of a folder via its contents (looking for a folder: "It's the folder with the Picture of Mom in it" for example). The OS X way gives you the best of both worlds. If anything, it should be Windows changing to the OS X way here for these important usability reasons.
5) Sort folders to top of directory listings
Not without merit.
6) More context sensitive help.
God... please no. Tooltips should, in the perfect interface NEVER be necessary. They are analogous to sticky tape holding together the interface... 'what's that? I've designed a crap interface and no-one can tell what this button is supposed to do from it's placement and icon? Well I could go and redesign the interface, or I could 'fix' it by adding a tooltip, and leaving it up to the user to figure it all out."
This sig has been deprecated.
There is nothing wrong with offering a context menus as an alternative as long as you provide easy access to those functions from the main menu.
Sometimes it makes more usabiity sense to use context sensitive tool palettes (inspectors) to expose functionality because it is readily visible on screen as opposed to context menus which are hidden until you right click.
Take a look a the success of the iPod as a "consumer" device. Part of the reason why it is successful is because it is designed to be as simple as possible and usable by the "average" consumer. It is not a "geek" toy nor does it include a lot of superfluous/niche functionality.
There are plenty of context menus through out OS X and OS X apps. What you will notice is that all functionality in those context menus are also readily available through other means. What you will not see is superfluous right click menus, only menus where it makes sense within the context of the object you are over top or have selected.
I think it is horrible design to rely on context menus for functionality and it is also horrible to include core functionality of an application's main menus within a context menus. It should only contain items relevent to the object you are interacting with.
OS X and OS X apps largely respect that ideal. If you have a problem with that, tough.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.